Spam on Video Sites?

Are a surge of spam videos turning up in search results on sites like YouTube, Revver, and Break? That’s the contention of Kevin Delaney at the Wall Street Journal (no reg req).

It seems he’s basically talking about tag spam — when videos are mislabeled with popular search terms. Perhaps this hasn’t happened to me very often because I don’t go searching for “Playstation Xbox Nintendo PSP,” as Delaney does for the article. It’s much more of a problem if misleadingly labeled or titled videos show up in most popular search results. For instance, the masterpiece below, “Britney Spears caught without underpants” (SFW, unless someone’s looking at the title).

That was particularly common circa December, when a whole bunch of videos promising skin but really showing moral messages rose to the top of sites like YouTube (see discussion in an old Mark Cuban post and an item from Reel Pop).

Now, not so much — Delaney quotes Suranga Chandratillake of Blinkx saying video sites have gotten things more in control following spam outbreaks in January and February. Yet Delaney also warns ominously about video click farms: “But some industry executives suspect individuals may be boosting the rankings of their clips by setting up computers to automatically click on the videos repeatedly.”